As of June 30, Skype was averaging 124 million users a month, with only 8.1 million of those paying users (out of a total of 560 million registered users). So 6.5 percent of Skype users are paying for services.
As a rough calculation, free Skype minutes of use therefore represent about 12 percent of global traffic. If the ratio of paid to non-paid use does not change, and if Skype keeps growing, the percentage of non-paid international calling, texting and video sessions will keep growing as well.
Paying Skype users, however, pay an average of $96 a year. Skype’s strategy is to keep growing its overall number of users and convert more of them to paying customers.
At least for the moment, most international trafiic represents a revenue stream for some service providers. But the percentage of non-paid traffic seems bound to increase. At the same time, the average revenue any single session represents likely will keep falling.
This implies that voice revenues will get cheaper, on a per-minute basis, while more traffic will move to the "free" category.
Skype revenues for the first six months of 2010 were $406 million, with a net income of $13 million. But a big portion of that was from interest income. That is a three percent net margin, overall.
Its income from operations was only $1.4 million for the six months, though margins on that business are 51 percent.
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